Daily Archives: 2016-02-11

This morning at 0930 the Joint Committee on the IP Bill is launching its report. As one of the witnesses who appeared before it, I got an embargoed copy yesterday.

The report s deeply disappointing; even that of the Intelligence and Security Committee (whom we tended to dismiss as government catspaws) is more vigorous. The MPs and peers on the Joint Committee have given the spooks all they wanted, while recommending tweaks and polishes here and there to some of the more obvious hooks and sharp edges.

The committee supports comms data retention, despite acknowledging that multiple courts have found this contrary to EU and human-rights law, and the fact that there are cases in the pipeline. It supports extending retention from big telcos offering a public service to private operators and even coffee shops. It support greatly extending comms data to ICRs; although it does call for more clarity on the definition, it give the Home Office lots of wriggle room by saying that a clear definition is hard if you want to catch all the things that bad people might do in the future. (Presumably a coffee shop served with an ICR order will have no choice but to install a government-approved black box. or just pipe everything to Cheltenham.) It welcomes the government decision to build and operate a request filter – essentially the comms database for which the Home Office has been trying to get parliamentary approval since the days of Jacqui Smith (and which Snowden told us they just built anyway). It comes up with the rather startling justification that this will help privacy as the police may have access to less stuff (though of course the spooks, including our 5eyes partners and others, will have more). It wants end-to-end encrypted stuff to be made available unless it’s “not practicable to do so”, which presumably means that the Home Secretary can order Apple to add her public key quietly to your keyring to get at your Facetime video chats. That has been a key goal of the FBI in Crypto War 2; a Home Office witness openly acknowledged it.

The comparison with the USA is stark. There, all three branches of government realised they’d gone too far after Snowden. President Obama set up the NSA review group, and implemented most of its recommendations by executive order; the judiciary made changes to the procedures of the FISA Court; and Congress failed to renew the data retention provisions in the Patriot Act (aided by the judiciary). Yet here in Britain the response is just to take Henry VIII powers to legalise all the illegal things that GCHQ had been up to, and hope that the European courts won’t strike the law down yet again.

People concerned for freedom and privacy will just have to hope the contrary. The net effect of the minor amendments proposed by the joint committee will be to make it even harder to get any meaningful amendments as the Bill makes its way through Parliament, and we’ll end up having to rely on the European courts to trim it back.